Tuesday Night Open Thread: Play the Hand You’re Dealt

Posted by Oppo on 1 June 2021, 9:00 pm

The standard 52-card deck has been around for 500 years or more. What is rather unbelievable is that there are so many possible arrangements of the cards, it is statistically unlikely that any two have ever repeated in all of history.

There are in fact 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000 arrangements.

The above number, while impossible to get your head around in any conventional manner, is 52 factorial, the possible orders of a shuffled deck. While enormous, the number is rather simply arrived at, by multiplying 52 down to 1 (52 x 51 x 50 . . . ). There are more possible arrangements of cards than there are atoms on Earth.

Do you have something you’d like to share? A link? A joke? Some words of wisdom? A topic to discuss? It’s our nightly Open Thread, and you have the floor.

So, Anyway . . . See Ya

Posted by Oppo on 1 June 2021, 8:00 pm

Asteroid as big as the Eiffel Tower to pass near the earth on June 1
The Week | May 30, 2021
The asteroid zipping around the earth on June 1, named 2021 KT1, would be 4.5 million miles away from the earth. While that may seem far, NASA considers any asteroid within 4.6 million miles of earth and larger than 150 metres to be potentially hazardous.
Smaller asteroids are expected to approach the earth on Saturday, Sunday and Monday and are expected to be as big as an average house or an airplane. In total, five asteroids are expected to pass near earth over the next few days.

Whiplash

Posted by Oppo on 1 June 2021, 6:00 pm

Facebook lifts ban on user comments about COVID-19 being man-made after Biden orders intel agencies to probe whether coronavirus leaked from Wuhan lab
UK Daily Mail | May 27 2021 | Ariel Zilber
Facebook will allow users to claim on its platform that COVID-19 may have originated in a lab in Wuhan, China – a reversal of its previous policy which banned comments suggesting the coronavirus was man-made.
The move comes after Fauci changed his tune on where the virus may have originated – and after Biden ordered his intelligence agencies to launch a probe into whether it leaked from a Wuhan lab.
‘In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps,’ the company said in a blog post on Wednesday.

… So, hero Joe Biden is going to sniff around, and get to the roots of this crime?

Oh, wait …

COVID PROBE SILENCED Biden ‘SHUT DOWN secret Trump-era State Department investigation’ into Wuhan lab at center of Covid ‘leak’ theory
thesun.co.uk | Laura Gesualdi-Gilmore | 26 May 2021
Joe Biden’s administration shut down a Donald Trump-era investigation into the Wuhan institute at the center of the Covid-19 lab “leak” theory, it was reported Tuesday.
The State Department effort to prove Covid originated in a Chinese lab was reportedly stopped by Biden over concerns about the “quality of work” – but will raise concerns of a potential whitewash.
The probe was launched last fall by allies of then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, CNN reports, citing sources close to the matter.
The news comes as a renewed interest into whether the virus could have originated in a lab has been made public.
A bombshell report released by the Wall Street Journal this week alleged that three staffers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology became ill and had to be hospitalized in November 2019, weeks before China disclosed the outbreak to the world.
The report led to renewed calls for a broader probe into whether Covid-19 could have escaped from a lab in Wuhan, where the pandemic is widely believed to have begun.
Even the nation’s top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci admitted that he was “not convinced” that the virus is naturally occurring.